RE: Ask a Catholic
June 3, 2015 at 12:03 pm
(This post was last modified: June 3, 2015 at 12:34 pm by Randy Carson.)
(June 1, 2015 at 10:07 am)pocaracas Wrote: My question remains the same: How do you fit in your head the information that a writing exists, predating the canonical date of the birth of Jesus, which presents a figure whose life contains details that match very closely to the life attributed, in the canon, to Jesus?
This question is about YOU. What is your personal take on this.
My take is that Tim O'Neill nailed this on his blog. Responding to the italicized bit below, Tim provides a pretty solid answer.
Quote:Another possible alternative take is that "Jesus" was actually the Jesus the Pharisee leader crucified by Alexander Jannaeus about 110 years ago before the alleged NT Jesus allegedly was crucified.Fr. William Most wrote an article entitled, "Dead Sea Scrolls: Threat to Christiantiy" which discusses the "Teacher of Righteousness", Michael Wise and a host of related matters.
Lots of things are merely "possible". Historians leave writing about things that are merely "possible" to novelists and stick to what is rendered "most probable" via analysis of the evidence and cogent argument.
The "possibility" that Jesus was "really" the Yeshu executed by Alexander Jannaeus faces the same problem as many of these theories that Jesus was "really" someone else - if the Jesus in the gospels was that Jesus, why did they set their stories 130 years later? That needs an explanation that accounts for the all the elements in the later stories better than the far more parsimonious idea that there was another guy called Jesus executed in the 30s AD.
You can find it on EWTN's website.